Take Aways From This Year's Admissions

We have so many experienced and knowledgable folks on here - just wondering if there are any interesting patterns to be seen in this year's round of admissions. To my lay eyes the big story seemed to be the waitlisting of kids at higher than expected rates. Is that a real change?

Replies to: Take Aways From This Year's Admissions

The continued move toward earlier decisions seems noteworthy. More colleges seem to be filling a larger percentage of their classes before regular decision rounds and some colleges have opened up admissions to June of junior year.

I agree with your waitlist comment OP, however I think the cause behind that is that kids are applying to more and more colleges. They think if they apply to more colleges, it improves their odds. I am especially thinking of colleges in the category below 20% acceptance rates. They erroneously assume that those colleges are matches or even safeties. It really doesn't work like that. They are then shocked when they get waitlisted everyewhere. By and large, most of these students are of the "average" excellent type. Plenty of stand-out kids are obviously still getting into great colleges. The waitlist results seem to be clustered around the colleges that fall just outside the Top 25 category. Bottom line, people need to assess themselves realistically, and they don't.

I noticed fewer threads of people wanting to back out of their ED acceptances. Last year there were a lot of them, many fewer this year.

I personally don't see the waitlist trend as larger than in the past few years. If you wanted to put numbers to it, wait until the common data sets are published for this year. Then go back and check against previous years. You can see if the # of students waitlisted was higher or not.

One thing I noticed (so I'm not sure it counts as a trend) is a continuing focus on 1st generation college students. Princeton said almost 20% of its accepted students for the class of 2021 are first gen.

The most obvious one is that all top schools recorded the most number of applicants than ever with the accompanying lowest percentage of admits. Given this pattern over the last several years, I can only predict that the number of cross-applying will increase next coming years. I detect a panic setting upon this year's admissions data, and that future applicants will submit applications to great number of schools. I suspect that we'll be seeing more students applying to 15-20 colleges as opposed to 10-15 in the past.

1. Things continue to creep more EA/ED. Which means RD continues to become more of a crazy lottery game at many schools. Which means RD apps continue to go up and RD admit rates continue to go down.

2. TBD what the waitlist data will show. My hunch is that waitlist practices are the new drug of choice for schools in the 10-30 range who want to goose their numbers a bit. Probably because the ED gimmick is pretty much played out when you are filling 50% (!!!) of your seats that way.

I wasn't aware of the waitlist gimmick until this year's rodeo. You could see that becoming kind of like RD2. Some schools now filling 10% of their seats off the waitlist...

The list continued to grow--the list of schools to which the average excellent unhooked kid cannot gain admission. The planning and school targeting process that parents are using continues to lag behind the reality of a changed admissions landscape. This message is all over CC, but somehow it hasn't registered early enough in the parental planning process.

I noticed that due to the increase in the number of schools that students apply to, the colleges have to lower the acceptances because they don't know what the yield will be. They don't want to overenroll. So, for example, when I checked our school's Naviance I noticed that for this year even the less competitive SUNY colleges (i.e., less competitive in terms of admissons selection criteria--mid 50% range of standardized test scores of the freshman class profile and the high school class rank) like Cortland, Oneonta, Oswego, Plattsburgh, New Paltz, had acceptance rates in the low to mid 40% range, which was very similar to the acceptance rates of the more competitive/selective SUNY University Centers such as Binghamton (44%) and Stony Brook (42%). The two other SUNY University centers--University at Buffalo and Albany had acceptance rates in the low to mid 50% range, probably because their larger class size could accommodate more freshman students.

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